Abstract
Psychologists debate whether mental attributes can be quantified or whether they admit only qualitative
comparisons of more and less. Their disagreement is not merely terminological, for it bears upon the permissibility
of various statistical techniques. This article contributes to the discussion in two stages. First it
explains how temperature, which was originally a qualitative concept, came to occupy its position as an
unquestionably quantitative concept (§§1–4). Specifically, it lays out the circumstances in which thermometers,
which register quantitative (or cardinal) differences, became distinguishable from thermoscopes,
which register merely qualitative (or ordinal) differences. I argue that this distinction became
possible thanks to the work of Joseph Black, ca. 1760. Second, the article contends that the model implicit
in temperature’s quantitative status offers a better way for thinking about the quantitative status of mental
attributes than models from measurement theory (§§5–6).